Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It&#x27;s a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that&#x27;s a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent cash.<p>This means that forums are <i>always</i> under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock.<p>Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing.<p>Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others later on, so they can re-read prior information.<p>Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.<p>Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.

The same reason why Reddit took over Forums in the first place.<p>No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling.<p>Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up.<p>Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.

Reddit is popular for many reasons but one reason for engagement among multiple communities (subs) stands out above the rest: the cost to join is a single button. You are already logged in and all you need to is discover communities that already exist on the platform, which Reddit facilitates by automatically linking certain strings like &#x2F;r&#x2F;subreddit which will naturally (or unnaturally) pop up in conversation. This is a contrast to the way that Web 1.0 and 2.0 BBSes and forums operated where each fiefdom operates independently, requires a user account, and admins or moderators typically had strict rules about linking to other communities out of fear of loosing their own members because the cost for their members to join other communities means an reduction of time spent on their own.<p>Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.<p>I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.<p>A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.

The meta-answer is that:<p>Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they&#x27;re personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join&#x2F;use.<p>If I&#x27;m a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I&#x27;d consider would be Discord (sadly).<p>With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I&#x27;m not going to take a bet on some platform that I&#x27;m not familiar with, or that most of my users won&#x27;t be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.<p>I&#x27;ve used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would&#x27;ve used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn&#x27;t work like that).<p>This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.<p>The two things needed to break that network effect are:<p>1) Another platform that&#x27;s a better user experience than Discord&#x2F;Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users&#x2F;no content<p>2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the &#x27;pluralistic ignorance&#x27; etc <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pluralistic_ignorance" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pluralistic_ignorance</a>)

Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that.<p>It also has Reddit&#x27;s critical feature of &quot;one account, infinite communities&quot;, something you don&#x27;t have when you become an indie forum.<p>It&#x27;s not very searchable, but people don&#x27;t care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.

I think Discourse is terrible, too. The beauty of reddit&#x2F;hn is that the more relevant discussions&#x2F;comments get pushed to the top of a thread. The community constantly shapes the thread such that when you revisit it 5 years later you can quickly glean what is important. A forum is really terrible for that.

<i>&gt; But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it&#x27;s overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine.</i><p>I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it&#x27;s a real loss for the web.<p><i>However.</i><p>Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord &quot;works&quot; how they want it to and has built the right patterns&#x2F;etc to hook people.<p>Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.

People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the updates and maintenance.<p>Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they <i>do</i> use it, it&#x27;s on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25&#x2F;mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.<p>Reddit has pretty much completely killed &quot;forum as a service&quot;. There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of &quot;what should we do if we have to leave&quot;. And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.<p>Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?

Personally, I’m not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All the packages I’ve tried weren’t what I wanted: missing features, clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain for something I should be using a package for. And I’m not sure how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people might post<p>There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit&#x2F;discord accounts though

Most of the time, when people have a question, they don&#x27;t know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.<p>Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.<p>The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.<p>LLMs also excel in this area.

Others have made great points already, but one thing I see mentioned is &quot;I don&#x27;t want to manage separate logins for all these forums&quot;. We need to remember that most people don&#x27;t use password managers and don&#x27;t like &quot;logging in&quot; to things. They see it as a hassle.<p>1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won&#x27;t bother.

Many Reddit moderators are interested in Pc Gaming, and Discord is ubiquitous in that space. It’s free, infinite scaling, and there is a big overlap in the user bases.<p>&gt; But discord is far from a real knowledge base<p>I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.

Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional forums. It&#x27;s less friction when you don&#x27;t have to sign up. If you already have an account, you need only subscribe to the channel&#x2F;subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in turn makes your platform more relevant.<p>The second reason is that Reddit&#x2F;Discord is its own source of advertising. You don&#x27;t start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.

It&#x27;s puzzling. Discord is for real-time chat, not static posting&#x2F;branching. Completely different in my eyes.

Why? Because some of those children who supported the platform while playing games with friends are now adults and putting their projects behind it. I am so disappointed Discord took off. What an absolute privacy nightmare of a site. It boggles my mind people are working on projects with open source components&#x2F;ideas and then forcing people to sell their soul just to read a CHANGELOG or find some simple instructions.<p>I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.

Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn&#x27;t really work.<p>Slack was popular before Discord.<p>I&#x27;d say it partially has to do with a learning curve.<p>More people are likely to have accounts for Slack &#x2F; Discord &#x2F; common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.

I&#x27;m not arguing for Discord, but I can see why it &quot;won&quot;.. It&#x27;s centralized, which, philosophically, is terrible, but practically is awesome; Nobody wants to maintain more logins&#x2F;identities than they want to, most want one, few wants a few, even less wants many. If I&#x27;m &quot;on Discord&quot; I can join so many different servers, without ever having to register another account, AND have this one single program keep track of all that goes on within those communities, that is a giant pull for me.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don&#x27;t need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to &quot;catch up&quot; via a side-channel.<p>It&#x27;s just too convenient.<p>Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.

Discord has a very good anti-abuse system in place that prevents most sockpuppet and spam attacks. The moderation burden on a Discourse is vastly higher than on a Discord as a result, and since most public forums have no paid moderators, the optimization of effort is strongly in favor of Discord over Discourse.

Everyone here ignores Discourse because it&#x27;s not &quot;cool&quot;. Some might complain about its UX issues. Yet those same people are tolerating the mountain of issues with Lemmy or Mastodon because they are approaching &quot;cool&quot; status.

The problem with fleeing one VC funded startup for another VC funded startup has nothing to do with the technology.<p>We&#x27;re talking about a <i>BBS</i>. We solved the tech problem <i>forty</i> years ago.<p>Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit?<p>If Reddit didn&#x27;t need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn&#x27;t pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.

If Discord works - it will adapt. It and its users will grow together.<p>This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.<p>They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.

(Marginally related): the thing that holds me to move to discord it’s because their “conversational” nature instead to be an idea board.<p>At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.

Lowest friction, but yeah I agree. Reddit was useful because it was searchable and self-discoverable, and Discord does not have any of that.

Because the people who &quot;generate content&quot; value participation. Creating a searchable knowledge base is always secondary.

Or even better, they could&#x27;ve used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn&#x27;t run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.

If you don&#x27;t have your own infrastructure or knowledge to deploy Discourse there are some costs related to it. As far as I know there is no free tier when it comes to Discourse. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.org&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.org&#x2F;pricing</a>

I&#x27;ve been wondering about this myself, and I wonder if anyone here knows: Would Zulip with public conversations be a good alternative? (I&#x27;ve never used public conversations in it and I don&#x27;t know how they work, but I love Zulip itself).<p>Presumably they can also be indexed, but I&#x27;m not sure at all.

Discord is more popular because it gives more instant feedback. This makes it far more addictive than forums

Reddit is nice because with 1,000s of eyes information moves quickly. Discord is nice because when you can&#x27;t get the quantity of reddit, you can mimic the quantity via discord because the rate of chat goes up enormously due to the nature of being realtime

According to you it&#x27;s overwhelming and &quot;not a real KB&quot;, but many will consider it a more natural UI for conversing than a web forum.<p>That&#x27;s what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using&#x2F;creating a proper KB.

Because the web is a dark forest. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest</a><p>Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk there.

I think the main reason: the forum is expensive. They cost a big chunk of money to set up for a large community.<p>And they missed so many features like a mobile app and notifications. And a lot of things that Discord offered.

I dont like having technical discussions over forums, its far to slow

I don&#x27;t understand why we would want everything to be accessible from search engines. What&#x27;s wrong with joining a Discord server and searching there?

A lot of people already have Discord for various reasons. It’s easier to convince somebody to use something that’s already on their phone.

Because you have to maintain it, you can&#x27;t monetize it, and people are afraid of the legal trouble as well

Aren&#x27;t discourse.org comments usually embedded into third party web sites? Also it appears they are paid.

Simple, because Discord is real-time chat.<p>Forums are way too slow and don&#x27;t automatically load the new messages etc.<p>And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users.<p>I don&#x27;t really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.

Discourse&#x27;s demographic is not small communities

If I had to guess, Reddit has a huge overlap with gaming where Discord is already immensely popular. It’s easy to set up from both a user and server owner’s perspective, and most Redditors probably already have it installed or have heard of it at some point.

I don’t think I can personally reconcile that reddit&#x2F;forums are incredibly different products to Discord.<p>To me, a move from reddit&#x2F;forums to Discord is akin to a move from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.

Because gen z uses both discord and reddit heavily

&gt; Why not use a forum-like solution<p>Because it&#x27;s <i>serverless</i> *badum tss*

The barrier to first participation is so much lower on Discord.<p>&gt; i need help lol<p>That&#x27;s a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted &#x2F; downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.